This may seem like a rather petty problem, but conflict can sprout in the most unexpected places. If you do give the player some leeway, however, the players that rolled high might believe that there was no reason to roll in the first place.
Gameplay focused groups are more likely to be a problem with large power differentials. In some groups this is less of an issue, particularly groups with a stronger focus on roleplay where being weak is not only a negative but can also be a characteristic for interesting scenarios. If you don’t allow the player to change their low rolls somehow, then that player will be weaker at a fundamental level than their peers. In order to achieve balance in our hypothetical scenario, you need to be the bad guy for one group or another. As I mentioned before, you would like to keep everyone at a roughly equal power level. If the floor has not been somehow increased then a player could end up in a terribly weak situation.
The scenario that comes to mind is with a player that rolls very poorly. This can cause some other issues too.īecause changes are after the fact, you can run into some issues with the randomness if you haven’t negated low rolls properly. All changes are either after the dice have been rolled or are a modifier set before the roll that was created based on guesswork. Rolls are only ever modified after the fact. It is quite difficult for the Dungeon Master to adjust the results of rolling for stats. You are rolling dice with a random outcome to determine a core, essentially permanent, aspect of your character. There are two big reasons that make balancing rolls essentially impossible. Rolling for stats essentially makes this impossible. All players should feel like their strength is comparable to each other member of the party. What you actually need to worry about is making sure a single player doesn’t have too much power. When you are worried about making something balanced you shouldn’t be overly worried about the party having too much power. I’m not talking about the balance of encounters, though those too must also be well done. The key to making all of that feel good is balance. When my parties reach the early teens in levels they are usually capable of clearing encounters for level 17 or 18 parties. There is nothing wrong with more powerful characters, though there is a degree of personal preference. Whether the goal was to prevent low scores or to increase the average score the result is the same: more power characters. From what I can tell, most modifications aim to make this system more lenient. I think there are a variety of issues that can be taken with this system, as evidenced by the myriad of ways people modify it. The scores should then be assigned to each ability score as the player sees fit. The Player’s Handbook indicates that when rolling stats one should roll four dice and record the sum of the highest three a total of six times. All of these are changes to the recommended method given by the Player’s Handbook. There are tons of different ways to do this including methods that make use of modifiers, conditionals, multiple groupings of dice, rolling in order, and many other tweaks. I’m taking a guess here, but my assumption is that the vast majority of groups use dice rolling of some sort to get the ability scores for their characters. Rolling Some Dice The simple die roll, random and vaguely entertaining. Without further ado, we’ll start by looking at the most common method of generating ability scores. I’ll let you know right at the start that I used a modified version of a point buy system, and the changes I made and rationale behind those changes will be covered once I talk about all the standard options.
As promised, I’ll be going through my thoughts and changes to how ability scores should be generated for player characters in Dungeons and Dragons.